Before man can cross the vast distances of space, the designs of spacecraft’s sails will be key – striking a delicate balance between mass, strength in addition to reflectivity. Working with NASA, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientists have created the fresh material out of silicon in addition to its oxide, silica. The team has figured out that will super-thin structures made of This specific composite can transform infrared light waves into a momentum that will would likely accelerate a probe to 134,000,000 mph. Speeds like This specific can carry a little probe to our closest stellar neighbours, a huddle...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) warned against the unchecked power of big tech during an exclusive interview with Breitbart News Sunday, recommending that America “looks at all the tools we have to protect free speech and prevent[s] the Internet from becoming a vehicle for censorship.” “The nexus of power in media has moved from New York City to Silicon Valley,” Cruz told host Breitbart News Deputy Political Editor Amanda House. “At this point, a handful of companies enjoy power that famed publisher William Randolph Hearst, at the height of yellow journalism, could never have imagined.” “We’ve heard reports from whistleblowers of...

Evan McMullin doesn’t want you to know who his donors are. The failed Never Trump presidential candidate has stayed in the public eye as a sort of attack dog against President Trump and other Republicans, while keeping secret the names of the donors paying him to do so. McMullin’s recently founded non-profit organization, Stand Up Republic, jumped into the Alabama Senate race this week with a $500,000 ad buy against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. One of the ads features a man saying Roy Moore “makes Republicans and us Christians look bad.”

Until recently, it was easy to define our most widely known corporations. Any third-grader could describe their essence. Exxon sells gas; McDonald’s makes hamburgers; Walmart is a place to buy stuff. This is no longer so. Today’s ascendant monopolies aspire to encompass all of existence. Google derives from googol, a number (1 followed by 100 zeros) that mathematicians use as shorthand for unimaginably large quantities. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google with the mission of organizing all knowledge, but that proved too narrow. They now aim to build driverless cars, manufacture phones and conquer death. Amazon, which once called...

With his $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has made clear his determination to dominate every facet of mass retailing, likely at the cost of massive layoffs in the $800 billion supermarket sector. But this, if anything, understates the ambitions of America’s new ruling class, almost entirely based in San Francisco and Seattle, as it moves to take over industries from entertainment and transportation to energy and space exploration that once thrived and competed outside the reach of the oligarchy.

You might think that, once you get through all the interviews and score a coveted position as a white-collar employee of a billion-dollar company, you'll be set. But if your job means living in the Bay Area, you may find that, even with a generous salary, you're having a hard time getting by. According to a write up in The Guardian, well-paid tech workers are struggling to pay for housing since the rents in and around San Francisco "by one measure are now the highest in the world." In 2015, according to SmartAsset.com, the cost of living there was "62.6%...

Engineers have exploited the tenacious nature of life by persuading it to build with silicon – the stuff of microchips. In a breakthrough study, researchers have tweaked a bacterial protein to knit together carbon and silicon, producing the basis for compounds used in everything from drugs to TV screens. The team claims that their enzyme is far more efficient than man-made catalysts and could reduce the cost of making the compounds and avoid using toxic material. As silicon-carbon bonds are not known to occur naturally, they are made in the lab by chemists. But in a first, the CalTech team...

Process node scaling is becoming very expensive Carbon nanotubes have long been proposed as a significant substrate replacement to transform the chip design industry as we know it. They can operate using substantially less electrical charge and are six to ten times faster than silicon, yet due to their incredibly small size they have proven difficult to work with. The search for silicon alternativesOver the past 62 years since the first working silicon transistor was made at Bell Labs, companies have used different doping concentrations to influence electron mobility on circuit designs. But over the past half-decade, the industry...

China is flooding Silicon Valley with cash. Here’s what can go wrong. - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/new-wave-of-chinese-start-up-investments-comes-with-complications/2016/08/05/2051db0e-505d-11e6-aa14-e0c1087f7583_story.html "Investment from China into Silicon Valley, excluding real estate, topped $6 BILLION by the end of the first half of 2016, with more than half of that spending taking place in the past 18 months, according to the Rhodium Group research firm. Investors have been spurred by China’s growing wealth over the past decade and a government push to develop innovative technologies — particularly in areas such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence, where China still lags."

Federal health regulators have proposed banning Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes from the blood-testing business for at least two years after concluding that the company failed to fix what regulators have called major problems at its laboratory in California.

At left, a deformed sample of pure metal; at right, the strong new metal made of magnesium with silicon carbide nanoparticles. Each central micropillar is about 4 micrometers across. Credit: UCLA Scifacturing Laboratory ============================================================================================================= A team led by researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has created a super-strong yet light structural metal with extremely high specific strength and modulus, or stiffness-to-weight ratio. The new metal is composed of magnesium infused with a dense and even dispersal of ceramic silicon carbide nanoparticles. It could be used to make lighter airplanes, spacecraft, and cars, helping to...

Researchers have written quantum code on a silicon chip for the first time And so it begins... FIONA MACDONALD 17 NOV 2015 For the first time, Australian engineers have demonstrated that they can write and manipulate the quantum version of computer code on a silicon microchip. This was done by entangling two quantum bits with the highest accuracy ever recorded, and it means that we can now start to program for the super-powerful quantum computers of the future.Engineers code regular computers using traditional bits, which can be in one of two states: 1 or 0. Together, two bits...

The significant advance, by a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney appears today in the international journal Nature. "What we have is a game changer," said team leader Andrew Dzurak, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW. "We've demonstrated a two-qubit logic gate - the central building block of a quantum computer - and, significantly, done it in silicon. Because we use essentially the same device technology as existing computer chips, we believe it will be much easier to manufacture a full-scale processor chip than for any of the leading...

Like Earth, the interior of Mars has undergone a process known as differentiation. This is where a planet, due to its physical or chemical compositions, forms into layers, with denser materials concentrated at the center and less dense materials closer to the surface. In Mars’ case, this translates to a core that is between 1700 and 1850 km (1050 – 1150 mi) in radius and composed primarily of iron, nickel and sulfur. This core is surrounded by a silicate mantle that clearly experienced tectonic and volcanic activity in the past, but which now appears to be dormant. Besides silicon and...

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside's Bourns College of Engineering have developed a novel paper-like material for lithium-ion batteries. It has the potential to boost by several times the specific energy, or amount of energy that can be delivered per unit weight of the battery. This paper-like material is composed of sponge-like silicon nanofibers more than 100 times thinner than human hair. It could be used in batteries for electric vehicles and personal electronics. Scanning electron microscope images of (a) SiO2 nanofibers after drying, (b) SiO2 nanofibers under high magnification (c) silicon nanofibers after etching, and (d) silicon nanofibers...

Veiled by the yellow willows and brush along a forgotten creek bed in San Jose, hundreds of people jerry-built a treehouse and constructed underground bunkers and ramshackle lean-tos to form one of the nation's largest homeless encampments. The 68-acre shantytown is just minutes away from downtown and the high-tech giants that made Silicon Valley one of the world's most opulent locations. For years, the city turned a blind eye to "the Jungle." But the camp along the muddy bank of Coyote Creek has become more crowded in recent years and is awash in rotting trash, rats and human waste —...

An increasing number of electric-vehicle driving employees at Silicon Valley companies are finding it hard to access car-charging stations at work, creating incidents of "charge rage" among drivers. Installation of electric vehicle charging ports at some companies has not kept pace with soaring demand, creating thorny etiquette issues in the workplace, the San Jose Mercury News reported. Peter Graf, chief sustainability officer for German software company SAP, says the company's 16 charging stations are now not nearly enough for the 61 employees who drive electric vehicles. Graf says cars are getting unplugged while charging, creating animosity between employees. A charge...

“Instant energy, just add water” – you might expect the expression under an ACME label in an old Warner Bros cartoon, but not from a University. However, researchers at the University of Buffalo in New York have demonstrated that nano-particles of silicon react with water to produce the non-toxic silicic acid and release hydrogen. The reaction is well known, but the university says using 10nm spheres of silicon works 1,000 times faster than bulk silicon. Published in Nano Letters, the experiment didn’t require external heat or light to release the hydrogen, which was captured by the researchers to power a...

The buzz at Pivot25, a conference for mobile-phone software developers and investors held this June, is all about the future of money. Ben Lyon, the 24-year-old business-development VP of Kopo Kopo, wants $250,000 to produce his app for shops to process payments made by text message. Paul Okwalinga, 28, describes his money app — called M-Shop, it allows you to buy travel tickets and takeout via mobile phone — as "not reinventing the wheel but pimping it." Kamal Budhabhatti, 35, claims Elma, the latest product from his company Craft Silicon, lets a phone do and be almost anything financial —...